Chance Encounter
by Sita Z
Summary: Some friendships tend to be explosive from the very beginning. My entry for 'Tis But A Scratch Month.


Disclaimer: Not mine, not making any money.

AN: Big thanks to Gabi for betaing! Writing kids stories is like chocolate to me, and I figured I needed some chocolate since RL has been kicking my butt lately. (Don't worry, the grown-ups get some screen time, too!)

Enjoy!

* * *

There was a red and a blue excavator. The blue excavator was smaller, so of course everybody wanted the red one. Trip had to wait until it was his turn. He watched as Katie who was playing with it put plastic bricks into the bucket, pushed it across the carpet and dropped the bricks onto a pile. There was a huge box of bricks waiting on the carpet, and a very small pile next to it. He looked back at the excavator that was slowly traveling along, carrying two tiny bricks. Taking other kids' toys was a Bad Choice. They yelled and hit you, and then the teacher came and you got in trouble and had to give back the toy and sit on the quiet chair. So he didn't take the excavator, although he didn't like waiting. But he liked the quiet chair even less.

He would play with the blue one until Katie was finished. He got up and went over to the toy boxes where he had seen it. He would take it to the indoor sandpit and dig a hole and build a basement. You needed a hole to build a basement. And then you put the house on top. He would need more bricks to build a house.

The blue excavator wasn't in the toy boxes, and it wasn't on the shelf. He looked around. There was Jacob chewing on the yellow truck, and Tom building a car park. Someone else must have taken it.

He saw the new boy sitting in a corner by himself. He had several cars, a forklift and a dinosaur lined up in front of him. The blue excavator was lying next to him on the carpet. The new boy didn't look at it, too busy trying to get a Playmobil knight to sit on the dinosaur's back.

Trip walked over to the boy's corner. It wasn't a Bad Choice if he took the excavator now. The boy wasn't playing with it, was he?

The boy looked up as he came closer, and he smiled, but the boy didn't smile back. So Trip stopped smiling and bent down to take the excavator. Only the boy reached it first.

"That's my car!"

Trip looked at the boy who was clutching the excavator. He was only little, not one of the Big Kids like Trip. He had brown hair and a small face and looked very angry.

"That's an excavator, not a car," Trip said. He gave the excavator a tug, and the boy yanked at the other end.

"Let go of my car!"

"It's an excavator. It's for Big Kids. Give it to me."

The excavator wasn't for Big Kids, but the boy didn't know that. He'd only been here a few times.

The boy didn't let go. He gave the excavator another yank so that Trip stumbled and fell on his knees, hurting himself.

"You're a poop face," he said to the boy. That was a word he had learned from Andy. "Stupid baby poop face."

The boy glared at him. "Am not."

"Are too. An' you talk funny."

"Am NOT!"

"Are TOO!" Trip yanked at the excavator and it slid out of the boy's hands and he fell back onto the carpet. "Nyah-nyah-" he began, but he didn't get to finish. The boy let out a cry and jumped on him, and he was a lot stronger than Trip had thought.

"Get off me!" He hugged the excavator with both arms and tried to shake off the boy. "Get off-"

"Give me back my car!"

"It's an-" _excavator_, Trip wanted to say, but just then the boy grabbed a dinosaur and hit him on the head, and it hurt very much. So much that Trip had to let go of the excavator.

"Malcolm!" That was Jamie. "Stop it, you two!"

She took away Malcolm's dinosaur and looked at Trip, and something about her face made Trip reach up and touch his forehead where Malcolm, the new boy, had hit him. His fingers came away red, and Trip began to cry.

"I'm bleedin'!"

"Just a scratch," Jamie said, then turned to Malcolm, who was looking a bit scared. "Do you know why he's bleeding?"

Malcolm looked at the dinosaur.

"Well?"

"He took my car," Malcolm mumbled.

Trip sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "Excavator."

"And he said I'm a poop face and I talk funny."

Jamie sighed. "Why don't we get you a band-aid," she said to Trip. "Come on, you two."

They went to the teacher's shelf and Jamie made Malcolm put a band-aid on Trip's forehead and say sorry, and then she told them that hitting was a Bad Choice.

"He took my scavator," Malcolm said, so she told them that taking other kids' toys was a Bad Choice, too, and so was name-calling and telling people they talked funny.

"But he does," Trip said, and Jamie decided that they both needed to spend some time on the quiet chair.

So they sat next to each other and watched the other kids play. Trip's forehead had almost stopped hurting and he thought of showing his band-aid to Mom and how Andy would be jealous that Trip had gotten into a fight and he hadn't. He looked over at the sandpit and saw Tom shoveling sand into the blue excavator's bucket. He was doing it all wrong. You had to use the bucket to shovel sand out of the hole, not the other way around.

"I'm going to be a policeman," Malcolm said.

Trip looked at him. "That's cool. You gonna have a gun?"

Malcolm nodded. "A gun and a car and a scavator."

"A policeman doesn't need an excavator," Trip said. "It's for buildin' stuff."

Malcolm thought about it. "Okay," he said then. "You can have it."

Then Jamie told them they could get up, and they played with the dinosaurs and had another fight, and when Mom picked him up Trip told her about his new friend. The next day, Malcolm didn't come back, and Jamie said his family had gone home to England.

Trip kept the band-aid for another two days, and when he took it off, there was a small scar on his forehead, which he thought looked pretty cool. He was a little disappointed that he couldn't show it to Malcolm.

"Maybe you can visit him one day," Jamie said, and Trip nodded and went off to have a water fight in the bathroom, which was a Bad Choice but lots of fun all the same.

* * *

The room was too bright and the noises too loud. That was the first thing he noticed. The second thing was that all he could see were blurred shapes, melting into each other like colors on a tie-dye shirt. He blinked, and some of the shapes began to change, albeit slowly. He blinked again, trying to raise a hand to shield his eyes from the bright light. For some reason, lifting his arm seemed like very hard work, and he let it drop back onto the bed.

Bed. He was in sickbay.

Something large appeared in his field of vision, blocking out the light. He blinked again, waiting a few seconds, and the large, blurred silhouette slid into focus, transforming into the face of Dr. Phlox.

"Commander," Phlox said. His voice seemed strange, too, echoing as if they were standing in the middle of a great hall. Or maybe it was the humming in his head.

"How are you feeling?"

He knew he should probably give an answer to that, but it was hard to concentrate with the world blurring and unblurring around him. He opened his mouth, and wasn't surprised to hear that his own voice sounded strangely off, too.

"Kinda... kinda fuzzy, I guess."

"That is to be expected," Phlox said, and waved something which Trip recognized as a small handscanner. "It appears that you've suffered a mild concussion. Your vision should return to normal within the next ten minutes."

That was probably reassuring, although Trip found it difficult to process all of what the doctor said. His head was still humming like crazy, and he became aware of a dull, steady throbbing which he couldn't locate at first. It wasn't exactly painful, but persistent nonetheless. He tried to concentrate on the sensation, and finally decided that it was situated behind his forehead. It felt as if someone were pounding the inside of his skull with a small blunt hammer.

"What happened?" He hadn't meant to say anything; the words had just slipped out. But it was okay, he realized; he was supposed to be asking that. It was what you said when you woke up in sickbay and had no recollection of recent events at all.

"A little accident," Phlox replied. "If you feeling up to it, Commander, I'm sure Mr. Reed is anxious to see that you're feeling better."

Trip's aching brain needed a moment to connect the dots. When he realized that Phlox was asking him if Malcolm could visit, he nodded.

"Sure."

He wasn't sure how Malcolm came into all of this, but he seemed to have something to do with it. Anxious, Phlox had said. Yes, Malcolm would be worried if he was in sickbay. They both ended up here far too often. Only a few months ago Malcolm had been stretchered in with a hole in his leg the size of an egg. Trip had been worried then, too. Then again, Phlox' tone seemed to imply that there was another reason why Malcolm would be anxious, but why that would be eluded Trip's grasp.

The curtain around his bed was pushed aside, and he turned his head. Malcolm was there, and yep, he did look anxious. His face was slightly reddened, and there was a sooty smear on his left cheek. He looked as if he'd been pacing to and fro outside the curtain. He probably had been. Malcolm tended to pace when he was worried. Anxious.

Malcolm seemed hesitant to come closer, for some reason, and Trip did his best to drag up a smile for him.

"Hey Mal," he said. "You okay?"

That brought a small, rueful smile to Malcolm's face. "I believe I should be asking you that."

"Oh?" Trip failed to come up with an answer to that. Malcolm looked very guilty for some reason, and he was still keeping a slight distance between himself and Trip's bio bed. It was all very odd.

"Yes," Malcolm said, and took a deep breath. "I would like to apologize, Commander. My carelessness was inexcusable, and I'm ready to accept any reprimand you see fit."

That made even less sense. It sounded like something Malcolm would say, but Trip couldn't see how it would apply to the situation at hand. The throbbing behind his forehead was getting worse, and he closed his eyes, waiting until the worst of it had passed.

"Mal, what are you talkin' about?"

Malcolm frowned a little at that, and Trip realized that he was supposed to remember something he had clearly forgotten. Something that had Malcolm all fidgety and nervous.

Malcolm turned his head and said something Trip didn't quite catch. A moment later, Phlox materialized at his bedside, glancing at the monitor on the wall before he looked at Trip.

"Do you remember your little accident in the Armory, Commander?" he asked. "Why you had to be taken to sickbay?"

Trip shook his head, then wished he hadn't when the room quite suddenly started to spin around him. "No... don't think so."

"Post-traumatic amnesia," Phlox said. "A fairly normal symptom. It only concerns a very short time span," he added at seeing Malcolm's horrified expression. "I'm certain the Commander remembers everything leading up the accident itself."

Trip thought about that. He did seem to recall going down to the Armory. Something about installing new software... the targeting scanners. Yes. Malcolm had wanted his help with the new components, and he'd promised to drop by the Armory after lunch. As he thought about it, more things seemed to be coming back to him; fragments of memory like setting down his toolbox, taking off a panel, asking Ensign Summers to divert power to the auxiliary relays. And Malcolm had been there, too, standing behind him. Saying something about aligning the EPS grids.

"What happened?" Trip asked for the second time. He wished they would just tell him. Maybe then his brain could begin to make sense of all this.

Phlox gave him his best reassuring smile and moved towards the curtain. "I'm sure Mr. Reed can fill you in on all the details."

When the doctor was gone, Trip turned to Malcolm, who looked positively miserable. "Malcolm, what happened? Come on, tell me. I really can't remember."

Malcolm sighed. "Do you remember bringing your laser micrometer?"

Trip remembered just in time not to nod. "Yes," he said instead. "I had it in my toolbox."

"You put it down on the console next to you."

Trip thought about it, and vaguely recalled placing the tool somewhere close so he could reach it. "Yeah."

"Well..." Malcolm cleared his throat. "I thought you were done with it, and wanted to borrow it to take care of the EPS grids. It appears that we both reached for it at the same time, you lost your grip, my hand slipped and I... hit you in the forehead rather forcefully."

"Oh," Trip said. He remembered nothing of the sort, but it made sense. The throbbing place behind his forehead must be where the micrometer had impacted with his head. He lifted a hand, and his fingers encountered something that felt like a band-aid, covering what seemed to be quite a sizeable lump.

"I really am very sorry," Malcolm said. He sounded it, too.

Trip sighed. "C'mon, Malcolm, it was an accident."

"I was careless. I should have paid attention to what I was doing."

"Sounds like I wasn't payin' much attention either," Trip said, wishing Malcolm would believe him. Talking was exhausting, and his brain didn't seem quite up to it, if his growing headache was any indication. "It's just a scratch, c'mon."

He wasn't quite sure where that had come from; the lump on his forehead was definitely not just a scratch. For some reason, it seemed like the right thing to say.

The smile returned to Malcolm's face for a second. "I beg to differ, Mr. Tucker. You look as if you had a close encounter with a cricket bat."

"At least it wasn't a dinosaur this time." Trip's brain seemed to have taken over control, producing random sentences that made absolutely no sense at all.

Malcolm seemed to have noticed as well. "Maybe you should get some rest," he said. "You do seem a bit out of it."

Trip nodded and this time the room didn't start spinning, although he was beginning to feel a bit woozy. He had a feeling he should be doing something; aligning the targeting scanners, installing software, digging a hole, that kind of thing. That was what he did, wasn't it? Building stuff. He'd need more bricks, though. You needed more bricks to build a house. And you had to build the basement first.

"I'll be back later," Malcolm said, and his voice seemed to be drifting further off, sounding different. Like another voice Trip had heard before, although where and when was buried deeply in his subconscious, and he didn't even try to retrieve the memory. Didn't matter, did it? He had a band-aid and scars looked pretty cool. And maybe he'd visit England some day. When he wasn't feeling quite so tired.

He closed his eyes and listened to Malcolm's retreating steps, the soft rustle as the curtain was pulled closed. His head felt better now that he didn't have to talk anymore, and he wondered if Malcolm liked water fights. They were a Bad Choice, obviously, but only if you got caught. He had a feeling that Malcolm wouldn't get caught.

He had almost nodded off when Phlox quiet voice brought him back, saying something that made no sense at all, but Trip found he was getting used to that.

"I was wondering, Lieutenant... the Commander was somewhat disoriented when he first woke up, and I couldn't quite understand what he was saying. Does "blue excavator" mean anything to you?"

Trip was asleep before he heard Malcolm's reply.

The End

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